Word.ws English Dictionary

jump scares

jump scares is the plural of jump scare.

jump scares is the third-person singular simple present indicative of jump scare.

Meaning of jump scare

Noun

jump scare (plural jump scares)

  1. A sudden, unexpected and startling event in media designed to frighten the audience.
    • They'd do something horrible, maybe kill off a few protagonists, and then make people sit around waiting for the next terrible thing to come along. They called it “setting up a jump scare.”2011, Mira Grant, Deadline, Orbit, published 2011, →ISBN
  2. (broadly, figuratively, humorous) The sudden arrival or advent of something unpleasant.
    • white woman jump scare
  3. (figuratively) A fright caused by this.
    • The loud knock at the door gave me a terrible jump scare.

See all 4 meanings of jump scare

Questions about jump scares

What is jump scares the plural of?
Jump scares is the plural of jump scare.

Words near jump scares in the dictionary

  1. jump ropes
  2. jump roping
  3. jump salty
  4. jump scare
  5. jump scared
  6. jump scares
  7. jump scaring
  8. jump seat
  9. jump seats
  10. jump server
  11. jump servers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jump scares (page history and authors); jump scare (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “jump scares.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jump_scares. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.